Office and backup files

One of our readers commented on a negative side-effect of our disk cleaning tip we posted last week. It seems that if you use our batch file to clean your hard disk, your Microsoft Office applications may no longer work correctly.

The Microsoft Office suite of products seem to rely on file called “data.bak”, which is usually located in one of the two directories, depending on which version of Windows you have:

There’s a bit of discussion going on here about this very problem. Microsoft also acknowledge this as an issue. What’s hilarious is their resolution which basically says that files with the “.bak” extension should not be deleted.

The real solution to this problem is to change the file attributes of “data.bak” and make them read only. This will prevent our batch file (and other backup software) from deleting the file in the future. If you’ve already run our batch file (like Jenny) and now have a missing “data.bak” as a result, just create it as a copy of the “data.dat” file in the same directory.

Why did Microsoft choose to go against all principles of common sense and give a “.bak” extension to a required file? Who knows. Numerous applications, some of which have been around even before Microsoft Office was born, create backup files with this extension but they never treat them as anything else than just that.

Backup files.

Posted in Microsoft, Software, Tips, Windows by Ivan